Subversive Women

Discover stories of women who defy the systems that oppress them with acclaimed authors Abi Daré, Naomi Wood and Helen Ivory. 

Join us for an eye-opening event as they share extracts from their latest books and shed light on how they’re breaking conventions to tell a different tale of womanhood.

Exploring themes such as the dark side of modern love, the perils of sisterhood, and witchy women, these powerful stories pushback on societal stereotypes and capture modern femininity in prose and poetry.

Tickets £12 

Abi Daré 

Abi Daré was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut novel, The Girl with the Louding Voice, was a New York Times and international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-one languages.  

In 2023, Abi established The Louding Voice Foundation to provide scholarships and empowerment programs for women and girls in underserved communities in Nigeria. She lives in Essex with her family. 

About And So I Roar

Plucky fourteen-year-old Adunni is in Lagos, excited to finally enrol in school. Having escaped her rural village in a desperate bid to seek a better future, she's found refuge with Tia, a kind and brilliant woman on her own troubled journey of self-discovery. 

But it's not so simple to run away from your past. 

As Tia frantically tries to protect her from an uncertain fate, Adunni must try to save not only herself but all the young women of her village, and transform Ikati into a place where girls are allowed to claim the bright futures they deserve - and roar their stories to the world. 

Naomi Wood 

Naomi Wood is the award-winning author of three novels, including the bestselling Mrs. Hemingway. Her stories have been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize, the London Magazine Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Galley Beggar Press Story Prize. Comorbidities won the 2023 BBC National Short Story Award. She lives in Norwich with her family, and teaches Creative Writing at UEA. 

About This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

"In my life, I had always been a good woman; controlling what it was that I wanted. But recently, I had started to notice my bad energy, and I began to follow it, wondering where it would take me..."

A woman has an unexpected outburst at a corporate therapy session for working mothers. A couple find some long-overdue time to rekindle their relationship and make an ill-advised home movie. A pregnant film director plots revenge on the actress who betrayed her. An ex-wife deliberately causes conflict at her ex-husband's wedding. 

Helen Ivory 

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She was awarded a Cholmondeley Award by the Society of Authors in 2024. She edits the webzine Ink Sweat and Tears, teaches online for the National Centre for Writing Academy and is one of Norwich Arts Centre’s Tilted Women. Her surrealist chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City was published by SurVision in 2019. She has six poetry collections with Bloodaxe, the most recent Constructing a Witch, is published this October. 

About Constructing a Witch 

Despite the Devil being conceived to direct human baseness away from our goodly selves, there has always been sin in the world. The Bible has it that woman is the weaker vessel, therefore her inferior ways could easily let the Devil into the house, and into her oh so corruptible body – and thus the story begins. 

Helen Ivory’s new collection Constructing a Witch fixes on the monstering and the scapegoating of women and on the fear of ageing femininity. The witch appears as the barren, child-eating hag; she is a lustful seductress luring men to a path of corruption; she is a powerful or cantankerous woman whose cursing must be silenced by force.